Chapter Twenty-Eight
I stood in front of it on the Monday at seven fifty in the morning with a badge that said my name and the letters after it, and I moved a chair about four inches, and then I moved it back.
Three years and three months since I was last in that room in that capacity.
Priya went past the doorway with a coffee and did not stop.
“Don’t stand in there being moved,” she said. “You’ve got a five-year-old at eight fifteen.”
Cassie Nance is twenty-seven and works at the distribution center out on 8, second shift, and she had taken a personal day to be there.
She had a folder with her. Not the kind Wade carries.
A grocery store folder with a rubber band, and in it were two years of paper: the pediatrician’s growth charts, a hearing screening from the health department, a printout about late talkers she’d found online and highlighted, and a page torn out of a spiral notebook where she had written down every word her son could say, with the date she first heard it.
Ten words. The most recent one was from June.
“They keep telling me wait and see,” she said.
“Who does?”
“Doctor Ellis said it at two and then again at three. And my mother-in-law says my husband didn’t talk till he was four either and he’s fine.
” She had the folder on her knees with both hands flat on it.
“And then I called here in August and it was November before anybody called me back, and then it was a list, and I thought, okay, that’s what everybody thinks. She’s making it up.”
“You weren’t making it up.”
She looked at me.
“Mrs. Nance, your son is five and he has ten words and the last new one was eight months ago. You were right and you have been right for two years and I’m sorry it took us six months to get you into a room, and I’m not going to give you an excuse for that because there isn’t one.”
Cassie Nance put her hand over her mouth and cried in that chair for about forty seconds.
Then she said, “Sorry,” and I said, “Don’t,” and we got started.
Toby said nothing on the first day.
He was fine. He was a happy, busy, entirely present five-year-old who wanted the truck and took the truck and did not look at my face one time in thirty minutes.
That’s the job. People think the job is teaching a child to talk. It is not. The job is the twenty-two minutes in the middle of session one where nothing at all happens and you do not fill it.
I have watched very smart people fail at this.
They fill it. They ask a question, and when there’s no answer they ask a smaller one, and when there’s no answer to that they say the answer themselves, and by session four they have taught the child, very efficiently, that if he waits four seconds an adult will do it for him.
So I did nothing.
I sent a truck down a ramp about ninety times over four weeks and every single time, right before I let go, I said the same two words in the same rhythm.
Truck. Go.
And then somewhere around session three I started holding it at the top.
That’s it. That’s the whole intervention. You hold the truck at the top of the ramp and you look at the truck, not the child, and you wait.
Six seconds. Eight. On a good day eleven, which is much longer than it sounds and about four times longer than most adults can physically tolerate.
Cassie sat in that room every session with her hands in her lap and did not say a word, which I had asked her to do and which almost no parent can actually manage. She managed it for four weeks.
On the twelfth of February, at eight thirty-one in the morning, I put the truck at the top of the ramp and held it there and looked at it.
Six seconds.
Eight.
“Tuck go.”
I did not react. That is also the job and it is the hardest part of the job. You do not squeal and you do not clap, because the second you make it about your reaction you have taught the child that words are for making adults do a thing.
I sent the truck down the ramp.
“Truck go,” I said. “Yep. It sure did.”
Then I put it back at the top and held it there.
“Tuck go,” Toby said.
Twenty-six times in nineteen minutes.
Cassie Nance sat in that chair with both hands pressed flat over her mouth and her face wet and did not make one sound, because I had asked her not to, and she did it, and in eleven years in that building I had never once seen a parent do that.
When it was over I said, “Okay. That’s a two-word combination and that’s the whole ballgame, and now we build on it, and I want you to do the truck at home tonight and I want you to do nothing else.”
She said, “That’s it? That’s all we do?”
“That’s all you do. He’s got the mechanism now. From here it’s mileage.”
She got up to go and stopped at the door.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Are you the one my sister’s friend told me about? Years ago. She said there was somebody here who was worth waiting for and then she said you’d left.”
“I did leave.”
“Why’d you come back?”
I stood in room four with a truck in my hand.
“I needed a job,” I said.
She laughed, which was correct, and she went out to the front desk to schedule.
I sat down on the little chair, which is fourteen inches high and which I have been sitting on since I was twenty-three.
There is a specific silence in a therapy room after a family leaves.
The blocks are still out. The truck is on the floor at the bottom of the ramp where it stopped.
And the room goes back to being a room with a mirror in it and a bin of magnetic letters, and for about a minute nobody in the world knows what just happened in it except three people and one of them is five.
Here is what I want on the record about the twelfth of February, and it is not about Toby Nance, who is doing extremely well and who now has more words than anybody can count.
For three years I had been told, by a man, calmly, in an ordinary voice, at intervals, that there was nothing left of me.
And in October he’d said it flat out at a kitchen table and I had stood there and not been able to think of one single thing to say back to him, and the reason I couldn’t was not that I was frightened.
It was that I wasn’t entirely sure he was wrong.
That’s the thing I have not said out loud to anybody, including Dr. Pruitt, including Roz, and I’m saying it here. From October to February there was a part of me that was carrying his verdict around like a stone in a coat pocket, and taking it out at night, and looking at it.
And then on a Wednesday morning in February I held a plastic truck at the top of a ramp for eleven seconds and a five-year-old said two words to me, and the stone was just gone.
Not lighter. Gone. I put my hand in the pocket at eight thirty-one in the morning and there was nothing in there.
I went out to the schedule board and Bernie was standing at it with a marker.
She looked at me and then at room four and then back at me.
“Well?”
“Two-word combination.”
“Huh,” said Bernie Halloran, and wrote something on the board.
Dean was at the copier with a stack of home programs.
He didn’t say anything about it. He wouldn’t have heard it, room four is at the other end. He just looked up and looked at my face for about a second and a half.
“Good morning?”
“Good morning,” I said.
“Okay,” he said, and went back to the copier, and then, when I was about eight feet down the hall: “Whoever it was. Congratulations.”
My phone went off on the fourteenth of February at ten past nine at night.
I was on the couch with a mug of tea and my feet up and eleven of the twenty-two intake calls done for the week, and both kids had been asleep for an hour.
It was a number I did not have saved.
Nora, it’s Cheryl Boyd. Don Boyd’s wife, from the department? I got your number from Renee. I’m not trying to start anything and if you’d rather I hadn’t I’m sorry.
I read it twice. Renee. That’s a name I had last seen in a contact list at one in the morning in October with two other words after it.
But I’d want somebody to tell me.
Then, thirty seconds later, four photographs.